Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 available for download

Veeam made Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 available for download end October 2012. I earlier wrote a blogposting about the new release.

Veeam offers a paid version and a free edition of the software. The free edition is named Veeam Backup Free Edition and provides a subset of the functionality in the paid editions of Veeam Backup & Replication.

Free Edition does have a number of limitations, including:
• Full backups of individual VMs only—no scheduled, incremental or multi‑VM backups
• No vPower capabilities (however, you can import VeeamZIP backups into the paid editions and use vPower capabilities there)
• No VM replication
• No scripting

A full overview of differences can be found here.
Download Veeam Backup Free Edition here.

Download the full Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 software and documents from here.

New features overview
Veeam is the first vendor to support imagelevel backups of both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. It is one of the first vendors to support the new VHDX virtual disk format introduced in Windows Server 2012. From a single console backup jobs of both vSphere and Hyper-V can be managed. Supported are VMware vSphere 5.1, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and lower editions.

Another new and unique feature is the ability to quickly recover VMs, Microsoft Exchange items and individual files from SAN snapshots. This feature is named Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots.
SAN snapshots are easy to make in a very short timewindow. However snapshot restores has always been a bit complicated when just a single file or VM needs to be restored. Veeam solves this. Backup & Replication 6.5 is able to mount the snapshot and present the files in the snapshot in an Explorer window. Selected files can easily be restored with a few mouseclicks. Even more cool is the ability to run VMs directly from the snapshot. Veeam already offered the Instant VM Recovery feature using its own backup repository. Now HP StoreVirtual VSA and Lefthand snapshost are supported as well. This allows a combination of very low RPO and RTO. Best of both worlds.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange is another useful new feature. It is able to restore Exchange 2010 items like mail, contacts directly from the Veeam backup file, a replica or from a HP StoreVirtual VSA or Lefthand snapshot. So no need to first restore a complete mailbox store. This saves a lot of time and effort on the recovery.

Advanced Monitoring, Reporting and Capacity Planning requires the Management Suite 6.5. This suite has Veeam ONE and Veeam Backup & Replication software. It allows monitoring of your virtual infrastructure including your backup. It does real-time monitoring of the backup infrastructure, Identification of unprotected VMs and Resource analysis.

A complete overview of new features and enhancements can be read in the Whatsnew PDF.

A video in which systems Engineer Ben Adamson takes you through the What’s New guide and points out some of the major and minor features and enhancements of Veeam Backup and Replication 6.5 can be seen here.